TNI summer reading guide.

• Position: Books - The National Interest journal's suggested reading - Column

The editorial board of The National Interest and selected associates of it hereby proffer some summer reading recommendations. For the most part; the suggestions constitute not light but enlightening fare. The editors will be pleased to learn in due course what our readers gain from them.

THERE COULD be no more I foolhardy an undertaking than to name a candidate for the most important novel of Henry James--something I shall now all too incautiously do. The novel I wish to name is The Bostonians, in essence the story of a war for the soul of a charismatic young woman. The combatants are, on the one side, a fierce suffragist who wants to possess her completely as well as to exploit her powers for the cause of women's rights, and, on the other, an intelligent and serious man who wants to make her his wife. The Bostonians was published in 1888, and yet nothing need be added to James' account in describing the emotional duplicity of the movement nowadays known as women's liberation, or the terrible tug-of-war in the hearts of young women between what they want and what they are now told it is their duty to believe. Great novels illuminate permanently, which is why we call them great.

MIDGE DECTER

MY UNDERSTANDING of the current issues in the Middle East and of the terrorism against the United States was greatly enhanced by reading Bernard Lewis' The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years. Lewis is professor emeritus at Princeton and the outstanding historian of the Middle East and its relations with the West. I read the book with the confidence that I was in the hands of someone who was both accurate and deep in his analysis. Since the book was written in 1995 it brings a perspective that might be missing in something that looks at the Middle East just in the context of the recent events. The book is very readable and is meant for those of us looking for an introduction to the thinking and culture of the region as well as the historic record.

MARTIN FELDSTEIN

AMONG THE books that made a profound impression on me when I first read it twenty years ago was Christopher Sykes' biography of Orde Wingate (London: Collins, 1959), which is a great book not by virtue of the writing so much as of the subject matter. Wingate--founder of the Haganah and organizer of the Ethiopian resistance against the Italians, who ultimately died fighting the Japanese in the Chindit raid in Burma--had to be one of the most remarkable individuals of the 20th century. Compared to our own colorless bureaucrats and orientalists, Wmgate was an eccentric who liked to meet in the buff and eat raw onions, and inevitably ended up siding passionately with the people he was sent to help to the point of imagining vast conspiracies on the part of his own government. Great preparation for a life in international politics.

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

WHEN ERIC Hoffer published The True Believer in 1951, his...